Vocabulary Lesson: Offboarding

My colleagues and I stumbled across a unique HR term today that I just had to share...

Offboarding

Offboardingdescribes the process of managing employee exits. While not the most pleasant thought, offboarding is an important consideration for any organization, because all employees will leave at some point. They may do so voluntarily (e.g., retirement), be let go, or be faced with situations like downsizing, layoffs, and reductions in force.
As its name suggests, offboarding is the opposite of onboarding (a.k.a induction, new employee socialization), which is the process of bringing new employees up to speed on an organization's goals and strategy, rules, internal processes, expectations, culture, etc. Onboarding should serve to bring comfort, understanding, and a sense of belonging to new staff.

Why is offboarding important?
An effective offboarding process may include surveys or in-person interviews. This process allows organizations to actively track who leaves; when they leave; how they leave; and in cases of voluntary exit, why they leave. These data can be extremely useful for helping organizations identify issues and continuously improve. For example, if all of your high-performing teachers are voluntarily leaving and you're not asking why, there's no way to know how to fix the problem.

What is HR's role?
Some experts argue that HR's role in offboarding is to build a process for collecting feedback from exiting individuals. Others feel that HR should focus on documenting why an individual is being terminated or why a position is being reduced. In order to stay out of trouble, districts should always contact their legal counsel and ensure that decisions are made within the limits of the law.

How does your district handle employee exits or employee offboarding?

Categories:

Ground Rules for Posting
We encourage lively debate, but please be respectful of others. Profanity and personal attacks are prohibited. By commenting, you are agreeing to abide by our user agreement.
All comments are public.

The opinions expressed in K-12 Talent Manager are strictly those of the author(s) and do not reflect the opinions or endorsement of Editorial Projects in Education, or any of its publications.